Paper 2017/465

Lelantos: A Blockchain-based Anonymous Physical Delivery System

Riham AlTawy, Muhammad ElSheikh, Amr M. Youssef, and Guang Gong

Abstract

Real world physical shopping offers customers the privilege of maintaining their privacy by giving them the option of using cash, and thus providing no personal information such as their names and home addresses. On the contrary, electronic shopping mandates the use of all sorts of personally identifiable information for both billing and shipping purposes. Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have created a stimulated growth in private billing by enabling pseudonymous payments. However, the anonymous delivery of the purchased physical goods is still an open research problem. In this work, we present a blockchain-based physical delivery system called Lelantos that within a realistic threat model, offers customer anonymity, fair exchange and merchant-customer unlinkability. Our system is inspired by the onion routing techniques which are used to achieve anonymous message delivery. Additionally, Lelantos relies on the decentralization and pseudonymity of the blockchain to enable pseudonymity that is hard to compromise, and the distributed consensus mechanisms provided by smart contracts to enforce fair irrefutable transactions between distrustful contractual parties.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Contact author(s)
r altawy @ gmail com
History
2017-05-28: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/465
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2017/465,
      author = {Riham AlTawy and Muhammad ElSheikh and Amr M.  Youssef and Guang Gong},
      title = {Lelantos: A Blockchain-based Anonymous Physical Delivery System},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2017/465},
      year = {2017},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/465}
}
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